A Scene from Factotum
by Pyrex Shards
Summary: Inspired by scenes from the movie Factotum. "I am a mourning dove, and people hear me calling from the rooftops, watching them while I swoon for something they’ll never comprehend."


A Scene from Factotum  
a _Hey Arnold_ fanfic by Pyrex Shards

A/N: This is extremely experimental and is intended to offend those readers who do not get it. It is inspired loosely by several scenes from the movie Factotum.

This is dedicated to the late poet Charles Bukowski.

"_If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives, jobs. And maybe your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery, isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance. Of how much you really want to do it. And you'll do it, despite rejection in the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods. And the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is"._

_ - Henry Chinaski "Factotum"_

O.O.O.O.O.O.O.O.O.

I wave a hand above me as I lay in my bed, watching the beams of light from between my fingers as they travel through the blue smoke from the cigarette that lays in the horrid green ashtray on my nightstand. It sits beside a book, _The Most Beautiful Woman in Town, Charles Bukowski. _He's my companion in this journey, but I've only just begun reading through the book. Sitting beside the book, a half empty bottle of vodka.

Goddamnit but I'm a light weight.

I let my hand fall to the bed and my eyes turn to the source of the light, a naked light bulb from an old decrepit floor lamp. The burning light assaults my eyes and fuels the painful inferno between my eyes. This hangover… It's become a companion of mine while I lay half out of my covers, naked like a bird. This headache is sleeping in my bed along with me and cradling my body within its arms, whispering into my ear and telling me about the wonderful time I had last night, yet I am the only one in the room.

My hazy memory of last night. I cherish it because I dread the day ahead. I always do. But I'm not going to bog my mind down with that. I don't want to release myself from last night. There are many dimensions of pain in my body, and I feel good.

I only got through the first story of the book before the words started to float around. A woman named Cass. She was the most beautiful woman in town, as the story title went. She was creative, she could control the weaker sex just by looking at them, she could paint, and she could sculpt. She wasn't dumb. She killed herself in the end…

…But I'm not like her.

Warm with alcohol, I had sat the book down. I played with myself the rest of the night to images of Arnold until I cried out his name in pleasure as I came. I repeated that self-centered ritual until I fell to sleep, where I now sit looking at the cracks in the ceiling of my one-fifty a week apartment building in the badlands of Hillwood, with sunlight spilling in through the window shades. What afterglow there is must be the alcohol, for the sex has left my body.

The cracks in these old walls are my friends, they tell me they see the cracks in my soul, and I listen to them. I can think back to a different time when this apartment saw a small family. The man worked the dock for the canning factory, an immigrant. Perhaps my great grandfather from the old country, with his wife and a small child, my grandfather Pataki.

I don't know. It's probably just my mind bullshitting me. These old walls have seen a lot. Now they see the nude body of a struggling poet, old enough to smoke, so she does. She's not "old enough to drink," but she gets booze anyway, and drinks. She's old enough to fuck, but all she does is jack off while muttering words of poetry in French and thinking about the boy she hasn't seen for a year because he's in some far off university on a basketball scholarship.

College…

My parent's went to college for two years and then Olga came along. Yeah, I'm no dummy. I know the reason they drove Olga all those years, all the way to the rehab center up on Hillwood's west side. She was their first mistake. They wanted her to succeed so she would be their redemption, a retribution they thought they deserved, in order to prove to themselves that they hadn't ruined their lives. Instead she became the mirror by which they saw their own failures.

I was no better. I was their second, ugliest mistake, and I was a reminder to them that they had failed. I was their monster, worse than Frankenstein's. I wasn't a mirror, I was the real thing.

The day after my eighteenth birthday. I remember it well. I woke up to another day just like the last. Even though the day before was my birthday, no one celebrated. I didn't mind. I got my yearly call from Phoebe; waking me up at precisely the time I fell from between my mother's legs, to wish me a happy birthday. She didn't have to do that. No. But she had to make sure that I was reminded.

She felt that it would cheer me up somehow even though I was years beyond that. It would have been better if she had called me and yelled mockeries into my ear, teasing me about how she kissed Arnold on a regular basis because she was his girlfriend. I would have felt better, well, better than the ruse that she perpetuated by wishing me a happy birthday. I wanted her honest with me. I love Phoebe,

I want her to burn in hell. But I love her.

I awoke on my first day of being eighteen, stood on the old cold wooden floor with my wobbly legs, and looked around. My room, my only sanctuary. But it really wasn't my room. I was a tenant where the landlord, my dad, could come in as he pleased, and he usually did. To yell at me, tell me about how I was a bad child and how I wasn't going to amount to anything.

I looked at my closet.

He burned my last shrine, and all my books, while telling me that writers were fools. A working person didn't engage in such things. A working person made a name for themselves by having a family. The sacrifice of my words, which I was forced to watch, was supposed to be good for me.

I wasn't as much of a writer as I was a poetess with a tortured soul, but that didn't matter to Bob Pataki.

I died inside with each word that became ash. I couldn't replace them. They were my children. They were precious to me. They lived, created from my mind, and he burned them, and in their death, I died too.

Sometimes in stories the dead rise up and become undead. Some zombies have faint memories of their past life, and they do things that mimic that. So that day I stared at the empty space in my closet where my shrine used to be, where my books used to be, where images of my soul resided. I replayed the days of my youth in that empty closet, kneeling down to my muse and dreaming of him.

Bob burned my carefully woven tapestry of words to my god, Arnold, while telling me it was good for me, on my eighteenth birthday.

And then the day after, his voice boomed through the house as I stood in the closet. "Olga! Get your butt down to the trophy room, pronto!"

I wasted no time. I threw on a gray hoodie and a pair of jeans.

This day, I had planned for it. This was going to be easy because my precious things were gone. I only needed some shirts, jeans, panties, a toothbrush, to do this. Everything I felt I needed went into a pink backpack from my youth. We didn't travel so I didn't have a suitcase. Once it was stuffed to the brim with things I needed, I made my way down to the trophy room, and kept the backpack slung over my bony shoulder.

I knew what was to come, deep down in my bones.

My father sat in his recliner with my impotent mother at his side. But I didn't see my mother. She was a living ghost, dead to me, invisible. She wouldn't talk, I knew it. She'd nod agreement with my father because he was the only thing she had left. I didn't factor in. I only knew she was there because the space she occupied wasn't empty.

My father had his huge hands on the arms of the recliner. He studied me, and I him, while I walked towards him and stood, his subject within the walls of his house.

"Well Girl, you're eighteen…" He stated plainly while I stared into his gray eyes. I can only imagine when they lost their color.

I nodded at him and spat. "So nice of you to notice." But I didn't look at him; I averted my eyes to my feet.

The man would usually pick that point to berate my insolence. But today was different. Today was his day. Everything was working well in his perfect little world.

"If you want to stay here-" he started as I looked up at him, "You're going to have to pay rent, some of the bills, and do you share of chores. You'll need to get a job and go to that community college up the street. If you want to work with me that's fine, but you start at the bottom and work your way up, like I did."

I finally looked up at him, at his balding head, his cheeks red with blood pressure, and that smug, self-important grin that beamed from his face. That form of my mother simply nodded in agreement. She had no say, she never did.

"Well Bob…" I found my voice and I stared intently in his eyes. I wanted him to understand completely. I wanted him to burn in my gaze, I wanted his blood pressure to go up and I wanted him to do the honors, because it was only fitting. "You see, there's only a couple things I want to do."

I knew I was walking right into what we both knew would transpire. It was written the day I was born that this would happen. I turned around so he could see my backpack, the one that once held textbooks, pencils, rulers, and pictures of my beloved. "I… Want to go to bars and drink 'till I stumble. I want to suck on unfiltered cigarettes and blow smoke rings at stray cats."

I tapped a toe on the carpet. "I want to do pot and get a tattoo."

I heard my mother gasp. I smiled. "I want to dance naked on a porch and sing Isobel by Bjork. And I want to be free to live in my memories of my times with him, with my, my precious everything. And… And above all else, above everything else, I want to leave this shithole, and go out there in the great big world and I want to fuck an Italian man in Venice because I know it would be fitting for my role as your folly child, your mistake."

"So say it dad. Say it and be rid of-" I turned around and my cheek met his hand, and the echo from the slap reverberated off the walls and made my ears burn."

He expected me to gasp, I know he did, but I held my breath steady. He expected me to shed a tear at the hurt, but none came, for you see, that slap was nothing at all.

"Get out!" He yelled. "I have no daughter!"

For the first time in my life, I smiled at my own father in appreciation.

For finally, I was free.

I sit up in my rickety bed and the headache jostles around. I think of shaking my head to let it re-ignite, but I have to let it die. Beneath my pillow lay a little pink book. It is the beginnings of my new shrine. It may be small, but it is also my best work, since I am finally free in this world, to express without fear.

To hide with only total solitude instead of covert cover, for Arnold's no longer in my life physically, only in my memories, my devotion to him lives on, and I can be with him there.

Pathetic I know, but it is the path I chose. Flipping burgers by day and writing poetry by night. I am a mourning dove, and people hear me calling from the rooftops, watching them while I swoon for something they'll never comprehend.

I stand up from the bed and look at the dust on the window seal. This apartment is shit, but it works. It's not where I grew up, and it has history that I can dwell in. It has poetry all its own, and when I read it I find that it is me.

I am as naked as the bulb in the old lamp that illuminates this room, but I shine just as bright. I am the dust on the windowsill and the crack in the ceiling. I may have been my parents' mistake but I am the walls of this place, standing tall and true, not moving for anyone, only subservient to the wrecking ball of my mortality.

And as I write this all in my pink book that lives under my pillow at night, I think of Arnold, because I can. Because no one ever told me I couldn't. And after I am done, the little pink book goes back where it hides.

I grin. Perhaps today I will go to work nude.

For I am free.

O.O.O.O.O.O.O.O.O.

_Even at my lowest times I can feel the words bubbling inside of me, and I have to get the words down or be overcome by something worse than death. Words not as precious things but as necessary things. Yet when I begin to doubt my ability to work the words, I simply read another writer, and then I know I have nothing to worry about._

_- Henry Chinaski "Factotum"_


End file.
